{"id":8329,"date":"2020-01-13T07:43:28","date_gmt":"2020-01-13T12:43:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8329"},"modified":"2020-01-13T07:43:28","modified_gmt":"2020-01-13T12:43:28","slug":"the-kennedy-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=8329","title":{"rendered":"*****The Kennedy Moment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By\nPeter Adamson \u2013 In this political thriller by former UNICEF official Peter\nAdamson, the reunion of five college friends launches a do-good project that\nnone of them could have anticipated, that has every potential of imminently and\ndisastrously going off the rails, and that has almost incomparably high stakes.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the early 1960s, a group of Oxford University students were best friends. As Stephen Walsh, a stubbornly Marxist professor writes to the others, \u201cWe\u2019ve lost touch, the months drifting into years and the years into decades.\u201d He proposes a reunion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Michael Lowell, the only American, leads a World Health Organization team on childhood immunization; Seema Mir works on a biography of the African American Hemings family; Toby Jenks is the hard-drinking creative director of an advertising agency; and Canadian H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Hevr\u00e9 is a physician, exhausted from the demands of tending patients within the minimalist health care system of C\u00f4te d\u2019Ivoire. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nrelationships among these friends, especially the two almost-couples (Michael\nand Seema; Toby and H\u00e9l\u00e8ne), are believable and sometimes painful because the\ncharacters are so engaging. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the reunion, Toby, with his flair for the outrageous, responds to the health professionals\u2019 angst over vaccine-preventable illnesses saying, \u201cSeems to me, possums, the obvious thing to do here is to get hold of a little test tube of cached smallpox virus and threaten to blow bubbles with it in Times Square unless the world gets off its butt and immunizes every last kiddie.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A\nfew months later, the friends reunite in New York. No one has forgotten Toby\u2019s\nlittle joke, and before long they have a plan to use smallpox virus to\nblackmail the US government into fulfilling its immunization commitments. But\nit must be carried out in complete secrecy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Predictably, the government focuses not on meeting these mysterious demands, but on finding out who is behind this little venture and stopping it. To them, it\u2019s bioterrorism, and a nail-biting chase is on. Meanwhile, Toby crafts a powerful statement for the US President: \u201cTwenty years ago, President John F. Kennedy committed the United States to the goal of putting a man on the moon within a decade. Today, the United States commits itself to another great goal: a goal for our times; a goal to be achieved here on earth; the goal of immunizing all of the world\u2019s children against the major killer diseases of childhood.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I loved this book and the daring team of characters that took on the crimes of neglect and half-measures. Hugely satisfying and out of the ordinary. Available here.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/a><\/a><\/a>Photo: anjawbk for Pixabay.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Peter Adamson \u2013 In this political thriller by former UNICEF official Peter Adamson, the reunion of five college friends launches a do-good project that none of them could have anticipated, that has every potential of imminently and disastrously going … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8330,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"*****The Kennedy Moment - A daring plot is inspired by the unnecessary suffering and death among children around the world afflicted by preventable diseases, with the authorities more interested in unmasking the plotters than saving the children.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[440,366,40,126,66],"tags":[1682,1680,1681],"class_list":["post-8329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-adventure","category-drama","category-fiction","category-reading-2","category-suspense","tag-infectious-disease","tag-peter-adamson","tag-smallpox"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/biohazard.jpg?fit=517%2C639&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2al","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8329"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8331,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8329\/revisions\/8331"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}